


Beasts

by eyebrowofdoom



Category: Ned Kelly (2003)
Genre: Dialect, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-03-31
Updated: 2003-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:02:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyebrowofdoom/pseuds/eyebrowofdoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Joe had shot Aaron, we headed back into the bush to the horses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beasts

**Author's Note:**

> Poor Ned, you're better off dead. Contains attempts to mimic a period voice, complete with informal use of verb tense and euphemisms alternately fusty and brutal.

When Joe had shot Aaron, we headed back into the bush to the horses. It was dark and still, and the horses’ stamping and blowing sounded the louder for it. Before, when Joe had put the dress on, he’d got tangled in the sleeves for a bit, and there was a bit of a smile despite it all, and I’d helped him straighten himself out and wrap his shawl. But now when he was taking it off, he undid the buttons and then just sort of stopped, as if he’d forgotten what to do next. And I said, “Here, here,” and then, “watch yer nose,” like my mum used to say, and I pulled it off over his head for him.

Riding quiet through the dark under the trees, we could still smell a touch of the smoke from the fires on the air. And Joe lagged for a minute and said to me, “Why do you think he did it?”

“Maybe he got to thinking he was a big shot, instead of a shit-kicker’s son like us,” I said.

Of course, I wasn’t at all sure that was the answer, as to why your mate who ate at your mother’s table does you in. But Joe had stopped, and he’d asked, and I thought I should say something.

 

Back at the camp Steve and Dan were dead to the world, lain down next to each other thick as thieves. The whiskey bottle was still sitting up with the cap on, so it wasn’t that they were pissed to the jowls or anything.

Still, Joe said, “Troopers could have waltzed right in and shot the bastards.”

“Aye,” I said.

Joe stood be the coals of the fire next to Steve and Dan, and he looked at the trees across the way. Then he looked at the coals. And he stood there.

I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. And he turned to me and I hugged him. I held that curly head of his in my palm and I said, “It’s done, mate. Don’t dwell on it.”

“Aye,” he said. We stayed like that for a while. I don’t think I’d hugged him like that since we were kiddies.

Then he lifted his head and looked up at me, and I thought, oh, Christ, all right.

 

Well, Joe with that banker’s wife. What with the way I gave him his excuse, it was only fair he tell me about it.

He reckons he just wandered in there and she’d started undressing, so there was a bit of back-and-forth and squealing about that. And then he just sat himself right down on her sofa. And then he says, he got his gun out, and he cocked the sight, and he laid it out on the cushion between them.

And she just said, “You beast. Oh, you beast!” and jumped him like a little girl jumping her daddy.

“Yeah,” I said to him when he said that, “but what did you do before that? Right before that. She can’t have just…”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just looked at her.”

I keep getting to thinking about it, which is not much good, cause it pops your eyes a bit. Whether he had her right there on the sofa, skirts up, drawers down. Or whether he helped her out with her dress-changing in so far as the part that needed doing before she could put the other one on, and had her nice and proper on the bed.

 

When we were little more than boys, I caught him with the postmaster’s daughter, out in one of the paddocks up off town road. Her petticoats, flipped up, looked like a bloody great white flag. You could see them from the road, easy. Anyone could have been passing, not to mention the postmaster, and a Paddy doesn’t get to hear the end of that in these parts.

So I crashed over there and pulled him off her, and said, “Oi, oi, Joe!”

Of course she ran away, still trying to do her buttons up, and not to this day has the silly wench looked me in the eye again.

“You cannot just…,” I said, “you can’t be getting half the neighbourhood up the spout, Joe. You need to be a man about this.”

He was sort of fighting with me, because I still had his arm. His tackle was still out, and he was grinning. “That’s what I reckon I was doing,” he said.

We sort of to-and-fro-ed, him tugging to get his arm back, and me tugging to stop him. We kept getting closer to each other, till we were pulling at each other from above the elbow. After a bit he said, “Are you a man, then?”

I said, “Eh?”

We kept wrestling.

Then he let one of my arms go, and put his hand on the front of my trousers, and I said, “What’re you doing?”

He started to squeeze with his hand. He did it again, and again, and I felt my prick starting to get hard, and I kept waiting for him to answer me but he didn’t.

Then he did: he said, grinning all the harder, “I’m no good, you see, Ned. And I’m just… I’m just being no good is all.”

Then he said, “You want to be no good with me, eh, just for a minute? For a minute.”

He took my hand and he put it on his prick. He was still wet from banging the girl, and I said, “Bloody hell.” And he got my prick out of my trousers and started to give it a pull.

I hardly knew what we were doing, but by and by, when he tried to back away, I was saying, “Eh!” to stop him.

When he turned away and got down on his knees and said, “Come on,” I didn’t know what he meant. But he showed me soon enough.

When we were done we lay about in the grass, panting. It was knee-high grass, and it was warm there in the sun, and I remember thinking probably no one was going to see us from the road, the lack of petticoats and all.

I said to him: “Well,” I said. “Is that buggery, then?”

“Aye,” he said. “That it is.”

I heard a cow in the next paddock moo, and I thought I’d better put my trousers back on. So I started getting them on, and Joe laughed and said, “It’s important to know what all the sins are, don’t you think?”

I rubbed his hair. “You’re a rascal, you are,” I said.

“Aye,” he said.

 

So we were standing together by the coals in the camp, and he was tall and broad as a man now, and he had shot Aaron tonight. And the bush rustled in its night time way, and asleep in their blankets, Dan and Steve snuffled quiet as horses in feed bags. And Joe lifted his head from against my shoulder and he stared me down, still and open-eyed and serious.

It’s not like a man doesn’t notice when another man’s handsome, is it?

He looked down at Steve and Dan, and at our wrapped swags, and he said, “You want to bed down that way a bit more, eh? Leave these two in peace.” He tugged my wrist.

So we did; we took our stuff off away a bit, out of sight. He stopped at a hollow at the foot of a stand of gums, where the leaf litter was thick, and he unrolled his blanket. So I did the same, and he caught my hand and made me spread my blanket right next to his.

Then we sat down and he was right by me, and looking at me, and I didn’t know how this went now we had whiskers on our chins.

He put his hand on my face and kissed me. I pressed my lips back against his, and then he opened his mouth, and we kissed like a man and a woman kiss each other, and it was strange, no end. He smelled of fire-smoke and tasted of whiskey; when my lips slid around they found wet beard.

Then he had his hand on my chest, and on my leg, and on my backside. Then he laid down and pulled me on top of him, and he was pushing his prick up against me, and I pushed mine back at him. And he whispered in my ear, “Take your trousers off.”

And I did, and he did too. And I waited for him to turn away and get to his knees, but he just lay back down with his legs spread like a woman. So I lay back down over him and we rubbed our bare pricks right against each other. “Go on, go on,” he murmured.

“Eh?” I said.

“Got a bit of grease, or something?” he said.

And I did, when I looked, scattering bits and pieces of gear into the leaves: I had some polishing oil.

He took it off me and he reached between his legs and started putting it on his hole. And my prick felt tighter and harder, and I said, “Are you going to turn over?”

“This way,” he said. “Let’s do it this way.” And he pulled his knees up to his chest, and then I understood.

No woman is as tight at that. His face crunched right up in pain as I pushed my prick into him, and I wondered how much I’d hurt him when we were kids. He grabbed my elbow, and I said, “Alright, alright.”

I waited, and he nodded and let me go. I did it slow a couple of times, and it felt easier, and he groaned, and smiled, and I said, “You like that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, “yes.” And bats flapped past though the canopy of the trees, and the leaves crunched under the blanket, and I buggered him.

He said, “You should try it.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that but that I didn’t think I would, so I just pushed his arms down, gentle-like, and I held them there, and I did him like that. And when I had done him like that for a good while, he wasn’t hardly looking at me straight anymore.

“Mate,” he said into my neck, “oh, me mate.” And then we got to that bit that I’ll tell you, is the same with a feller as with a girl, the bit when you’re all hot and cold and trembling, and banging away, and there’s not a single thing else you can bloody well think about.

All at once he groaned sharp and proper, like hurting again, and his eyes rolled back in his head, and he shot his seed up over his belly. I stopped for him and we both panted like spent horses. But he said, “Come on, bloody nail me.”

I didn’t need much more encouragement than that — I did him quick and hard, and then I spent myself so I twitched all over.

As I pulled out, I could feel my seed wet around me up inside him, and I sort of laughed and said, “Don’t know what use you’ve got for that, up there.”

“Me neither,” he said, and laughed as well.

I lay down next to him, and he held my wrist across his chest.

He said, “The Lord made us this way, you know, one way or another. And I don’t rightly understand it myself, that a bloke…” But he didn’t go on any further, just grinned.

“Come on, we’ll freeze our arses off,” I said, and sat up to get my trousers on.

When we were dressed again, we lay beside each other, wrapped in our blankets. After a bit, he said, “Gunna get ourselves shot with this, one way or t’other, aren’t we?”

“Probably,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re a good mate,” he said.

“You too,” I said. I put my hand on his hand.

There was a noise behind me, and when I rolled over, I saw a figure a bit of a way down the gully, in the moonlight. It was Dan, pissing. “Just Dan,” I said.


End file.
